Portable or personal video recording (PVR) camera equipment, such as the ubiquitous HandyCam® Camcorder, has been widely available as a consumer electronics item for a number of years. Nonetheless, transport and accessibility limitations heretofore inherent in such equipment has limited personal video recording. Even with continued reductions in the form factor and expense of PVR camera equipment, because existing video recording functionality has not fully integrated with existing technological infrastructure, recordation of video remains far more removed from daily life than many other activities based on consumer electronics, like the wireless/cellular telephone for example.
One issue is that carrying PVR camera equipment, no matter what the size, is relatively cumbersome and significantly limits the activities in which the user recording video may participate. Furthermore, attempts at “hands-free” PVR camera equipment to date have generally resulted in rather cumbersome configurations of discrete components which are impractical for everyday use by the general public.
The temporal limitations of PVR camera equipment of any form factor to date is another issue which has limited the relevance of recorded video. Even if PVR camera equipment is readily accessible to an individual, for example as carried in a user's pocket, interesting but unexpected events are all but missed. For example, a vast number of videos accessible on video sharing websites, such as YouTube.com, are clips of chance events. However, virtually all of those videos suffer the same defect of the recording being initiated about 30 seconds to one minute too late to capture the entire event as it unfolded in real time. Typically, by the time a user realizes that a notable unplanned event is occurring, accesses and positions their PVR camera equipment, much of a non-premeditated event is missed.
Editing the recorded video from the PVR equipment is also difficult and cumbersome. Editing video typically requires the user to use a complicated video editing application on a personal computer to edit their recorded video. For example, to create a video clip from recorded video, the user seeks through the video to find the starting point of the clip of interest and mark it as start and seeks to find the ending of the clip of interest and mark it as end. The clip can then be made. However, it can be cumbersome to find the right starting or ending point, especially if the display is relatively small and/or is a touchscreen display. Historically, the amount of video that actually gets shared with others is considerably less than the video acquired (recorded). Even with the advent of computers and digital media, the vast majority of video remains unused. Furthermore, as time goes on, the relevance of the video to the user quickly diminishes.